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Literature and Philosophy: Intersection and Boundaries

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Literature and Philosophy: Intersection and Boundaries Arts 2015, 4, 1-22; doi:10.3390/arts4010001 OPEN ACCESS arts ISSN 2076-0752 www.mdpi.com/journal/arts Article Literature and Philosophy: Intersection and Boundaries Iris Vidmar Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia; E-Mail: [email protected]; Tel. +385 51 406-500 External Editor: Maria Fusco Received: 17 October 2012 / Accepted: 27 May 2013 / Published: 30 December 2014 Abstract: This paper is inspired by the manuscript of Philip Kitcher’s forthcoming book Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach, in which he offers a brilliant, philosophically inspired reading of Thomas Mann’s novel, as well as his views on the relationship between literature and philosophy. One of Kitcher’s claims, which is my starting point, is that philosophy can be done not only by philosophers but also within some art forms, such as literature and music. Within the literary text, Kitcher claims, philosophy lies in the showing and the text can influence the way readers think and perceive the world. Due to this claim, I see Kitcher as pertaining to the group of literary cognitivists. He offers some powerful arguments in support of the cognitive value of literature, although his approach is substantially different from the arguments usually put forward in defence of literary cognitivism. In this paper, my aim is twofold: firstly, I want to analyse the relationship between philosophy and literature with the aim of showing that despite some overlap between the two disciplines, we have to keep them separate. Secondly, I want to explore what ramifications this has for literary cognitivism. Key words: humanism; literature; literary cognitivism; philosophy 1. Introduction In Joyce’s Kaleidoscope: An Invitation to Finnegans Wake Philip Kitcher showed just how profound a philosophical reading of a literary work can be. In his forthcoming book on ‘philosophy in Arts 2015, 4 2 literature’, Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach1, Kitcher goes even further in elaborating on the connections between philosophy and literature. Throughout the book he advances what he calls the broader conception of philosophy, “suggesting affinities among works of art, music, and literature and philosophical themes, even juxtaposing quite diverse art forms to ideas from different philosophers”. Part of his project is to show that art can be just as powerful a medium for the expression of philosophical ideas as philosophy itself, primarily due to the complexity and importance of the questions it asks and the way it elaborates on them. Interesting and thought provoking as this claim is in itself, I will not deal with it here, though I remain sceptical over its plausibility. Here I want to focus on what Kitcher has to say about literature and (i) its relation to philosophy and (ii) the way it influences readers cognitively. In respect to (i), Kitcher takes ‘the supposed barrier between literature and philosophy to be highly permeable’ and ‘often breached’. He relies here on Hermann Broch, to whom he attributes the aim ‘to break down the barrier’ between philosophy and literature. In respect to (ii), in accounting for literature’s impact on the way people think, Kitcher offers us a powerful answer to the sceptic’s concerns about the cognitive dimension of literature. Throughout this paper, I will be mostly concerned with the relationship between philosophy and literature. I will claim that we can interpret this ‘breaking down the barriers’ thesis in two ways: intersection thesis (IT), according to which there is indeed an area of overlap or intersection between literature and philosophy, and merging thesis (MT), according to which literature and philosophy can be merged, with the barriers between the two erased. My conclusion will be that the intersection thesis is justified; philosophy and literature indeed intersect and they do that in two relevant areas: in thematic concepts they operate with and in the impact they have on the readers (which is the aspect Kitcher insists upon). However, as I hope to show in part 3.4, IT is in itself not strong enough to justify the MT, only to provide arguments in favour of literary cognitivism. In the next chapter I will give an outline of Kitcher’s view and then proceed to IT and MT. Given that this discussion is set against a more general framework of literary cognitivism, in the concluding chapter I will see how my conclusions regarding the relationship between the two fare with respect to it. 2. Kitcher on Death in Venice: humanism and literary cognitivism in Kitcher’s book Let’s begin with doing philosophy through literature. As Kitcher sees it, there are “three grades of philosophical involvement that literary, or musical, work may manifest”. 3 The first one (the shallowest) is “that of simply using some philosophical reference to enrich a literary text”, as Dickens did in Hard Times, where he alluded to utilitarianism and political economy. In the second grade, “substantive ideas from philosophy are taken over and applied to the literary account” of some phenomena, done in the way that Dante organized his Inferno on Aristotelian principles. Finally, in the third grade, fictional work is used for the exploration of philosophical questions, but in a way that the author not only works with the proposals of others, but actually “develops answers of his/her own”. It 1 Kitcher P. (2013), Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach, Columbia University Press. In this paper I rely on the manuscript of the book. 3 For the ‘three grades involvement’ account see the first chapter. Arts 2015, 4 3 is here that Kitcher makes one more important distinction, between two ways philosophy can be done within literary works: it can be done by saying and by showing. Philosophy done by saying is conducted in novels where authors take up some ‘philosophical conundrum’ and then elaborate on those abstract issues, although “these excursions do not seem to be organically integrated with the development of a plot or character, but simply to serve as opportunities for the author’s expression of views about abstract issues”. He dismisses this as “fiction that argues” which is for that reason “typically dead”4. His prime concern is then the following: “I want to focus on a different category of philosophical fiction, one that comprises works in which philosophical explorations are organically integrated with the narrative, with the evocation and development of character, and with the literary style. Works of this sort may take over questions descending from canonical philosophical texts – and the author may even adopt the formulations offered by those texts - but the answers proposed, elaborated and even defanded are the author’s own. Or the author may be concerned with issues he/she takes to be unfocused, or even unposed, in any existing genre” (Kitcher, ms. p. 18). Kitcher here relies on Hermann Broch who claims that literature should concern itself with those human problems which are either banished from the sciences because they are intractable or with those problems that sciences are not yet ready to grasp. Kitcher himself wants to focus on “... the recurring questions that seem to resist efforts to find convincing answers, and are thereby vulnerable to dismissal by those impatient with philosophy’s apparent ability to keep talking forever”(ms.p.18). The whole purpose of this project is to “break down the barrier between philosophy – serious philosophy – and literature”, something that was (as Kitcher sees it) done by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Voltaire, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Coleridge, Proust, Kafka and Camus, and to the highest extent, by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce and in music by Schubert, Mahler and Wagner (ms. p. 18). By claiming that “philosophical explorations are organically integrated with the narrative, with the evocation and development of character, and with the literary style” and that fiction that does not do this is dead, Kitcher subscribes to the strongest form of literary cognitivism, in that not only is literature cognitively valuable (the so called epistemic thesis), but also this cognitive dimension enhances its aesthetic value (aesthetic thesis). It is along these same lines that Kitcher formulates his response to what is usually called ‘the sceptic position’ (or anti-cognitivist position). The first question that a sceptic raises is the following: can 4 Kitcher’s argument here is based on his reading of Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften and what he sees as the problem is the fact that ‘philosophical’ aspects of work are cut off from the story: these ‘discursive passages’ are “easily transformable into pages from a standard work of philosophy...” (ms. p. 17). Kitcher might be asked to further explain why this kind of fiction is ’dead’. One possibility is that this sort of fiction lacks the power to trigger psychological processes he sees as crucial to bring about the change in perspective (on which more below). This is problematic however, because he should then explain why ‘standard work of philosophy’ has that power. Another answer, I think more promising, is a desire to avoid didacticism and instrumentalism in literature. But the fact remains, there are works of fiction which might be seen as saying, but which nevertheless are not dead. Arts 2015, 4 4 philosophy be done through literature if literary fiction does not argue? The problem is that serious philosophy should argue (and use arguments and conclusions), but these argumentative devices are not found in literature. This line of reasoning was developed by Stein Haugom Olsen and Jerome Stolnitz5. By formulating a sceptical position along these lines, Kitcher resonates two arguments that are often put forward by sceptics. The first one is the so-called ‘no argument’ argument, according to which a reader cannot trust what he reads in a work because literary works do not provide arguments in support of the claims they put forward.
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